I recently moved my website to a shared hosting solution at asmallorange.com, but I had to set my domain to use their provided nameservers in order for the site to properly resolve. I was determined to keep control of the domain's DNS but I could find no way to make my top level domain resolve to the shared location which was in the format of
server.asmallorange.com/~username
So I know I'm missing something here, my question is this:
What in their nameservers/DNS entry makes it possible for server.sharedhost.com/~username to serve as a top level domain? (ie. http://topleveldomain.com)
Nothing. DNS simply maps topleveldomain.com to server.sharedhost.com. It's the webserver which looks at the Host: topleveldomain.com header and knows that's equivalent to server.sharedhost.com/~username.